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Tag Archives: Trinidad

After a challenging start in Chaguaramas (we had to pull the boat back out and get if fixed over night) we got into the swing of things, sailed over night to the Grenadines and enjoyed a couple of days of island hoping before continuing to Antigua.

The roughly 400nm route looked like this:

We did not capture as much footage as usual. Hopefully the video below still gives somewhat of a flavor of the places we visited:

If you remember, the summer of 2011 was an eventful one. Hurricane Irene made it all the way to New England in August and Tioga barely survived the by then tropical storm.
While we were extremely impressed seeing her back in the water in Manchester-by-the-sea (she looked like a brand new boat), we relatively quickly started to think that the new Awlgrip job had some flaws.
A lot of small micro-cracks developed within a year and continued to do so ever since. The paint was also a lot more sensitive to scratches than the one we had before.
We think it was caused by not letting the 7 layers of paint dry/harden properly and by not using the correct filler underneath that.
While Tioga continued to look beautiful from a distance, the increase in cracks was unsettling.

We therefore made the call to redo the Awlgrip while in Trinidad (and hopefully in more capable hands).

Kamba, aka Cow, got started last week and is making good progress. They closed the gap between hull and shrink-wrap to protect the inside from all the dust the work is creating. As a result, working on the deck has become a little more uncomfortable due to lack of airflow and increased temperature, but it is continuing as planned.
So far, so good…